The '50s saw a rather subdued Chief Rabbinate. It is difficult to relate to the feelings of that time. Israel was new, and its survival precarious. The first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, was tough. He saw it as his historical obligation to establish the kind of country and society that his ideology dictated. He refused to even speak with non-Socialist members of the Knesset. Menachem Begin, the man most responsible for an independent Israel, remained a pariah until 1967. Some topics are still too hot for discussion, even today. It is a fact that children were stolen from some families and given to others, with the real parents told that they were dead. Whether this happened in only 40 to 45 cases, as the government has claimed, or in many hundreds of cases, as Yemenite and Sepharadic families claim, is still a sore point. Recently declassified documents are showing that it is all too true. It came out only in the late 1980s, that Ben Gurion hatched a plan to take away the children of the Bedouins, having them converted and given for adoption by Jewish families. His goal was to lessen Israel's demographic problem. The Chief Rabbis bravely refused to cooperate, and the topic was dropped. The Chief Rabbis of that decade did everything possible to uphold Torah to the best of their ability, while appeasing secular demands...when reasonable. The Sepharadic Chief Rabbi of the early '50s, Rabbi Uziel, formulated an extremely liberal conversion policy, which was upheld by subsequent Chief Rabbis until the early 1990s. Hareidi (Ultra Orthodox) groups saw the Chief Rabbis as tools of the secular, religiously oppressive regime (it was virtually impossible to get a job unless one belonged to the Labor party, and sent one's children to secular schools). At the same time, many secularists began speaking of "religious coercion". Through a series of compromises, buses didn't work on Shabbat in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but did in Haifa (this is still the case). Nearly all businesses were required by law to be closed on Shabbat. Violations brought demonstrations. Demonstrations brought cries of "the tail wagging the dog'' (the religious being a minority). No one was really satisfied by the arrangement. For the most part, secularists developed, or strengthened, a deep seated hatred of religion and the religious. Most religious felt persecuted, and developed a hatred for the secular. The followers of Rav Kook's philosophy, while not liking secularism, were certain that a great religious revival was imminent, specifically through the secularists and their agenda. The "Kookniks" saw the secularists in a more positive light than they saw the Hareidim, who were "impeding" the final deliverance. There was an uneasy truce, worded as "status quo". Israeli law defended those areas where religion had prevailed, as well as those areas where secularism had prevailed. A bump in the road occurred when Israel got television in the late '60s (Ben Gurion had not allowed it during his tenure). The "status quo" was that there IS radio on Shabbat. Should that apply to TV, which was new? The courts ruled that it does not. Many religious henceforth refused to pay the "television and radio tax" in protest. The Chief Rabbinate was always a force for moderation in these issues. But that was minor compared to the fight that was looming. The question of "who is a Jew" (which affects not only religious identity but also political rights) began to loom large. A number of cases hit the public awareness, These cases drew lines in the sand. Any compromise would infuriate one side or the other, and sometimes both. I will examine some of these cases, their far-reaching effects, and the changing face of the Chief Rabbinate, in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment